Blending insights and evidence: Co-creating a community health worker intervention for postpartum patients with...

Preeclampsia is associated with an increased risk of future maternal cardiovascular disease and death. The American Heart Association (AHA) advocates for embedding place-based interventions within communities to reduce long-term cardiovascular health consequences. Yet a significant gap remains in proven strategies for postpartum risk reduction. Our objective was to design a pilot intervention that is now being tested in a randomized controlled acceptability and feasibility study.

We leveraged our existing partnerships with a nonprofit community health worker (CHW) organization and our community advisory board to co-create a postpartum CHW-led intervention for people with preeclampsia. Using human-centered design, we engaged in a workshop with people with lived experience of preeclampsia and other adverse cardiovascular pregnancy outcomes, CHWs, and clinicians. We employed client personas, an integrated service blueprint-patient journey map, and other human-centered design tools to develop a postpartum CHW-led intervention.

We successfully adapted an existing perinatal CHW program to address the specific needs of postpartum individuals with preeclampsia. The resulting intervention pairs patients and their infants with CHWs who provide culturally tailored health education, emotional support, social service coordination, and community resource linkages during the first 12 weeks postpartum. Novel preeclampsia components include close blood pressure monitoring and facilitated connections to primary care providers focused on cardiovascular disease risk reduction.

Human-centered design tools supported a diverse group of patients and providers to rapidly design a pilot postpartum CHW intervention that supports patients with preeclampsia, which is being tested in our acceptability and feasibility trial (NCT06353256).